New OUPblog Posts

October 24, 2016

""If you were accused of a crime that you did not commit, how confident are you that you would be found innocent? And what injuries and injustices could you endure before your innocence was finally proven? I think about these questions often, after having devoted nearly a decade to studying the People v. Zammora, more popularly known as the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial. [...]"Read more

"On 7 September 1940, German bombers raided the east London docks area in two waves of devastating attacks. The date has always been taken as the start of the so-called ‘Blitz’ (from the German ‘Blitzkrieg’ or lightning war), when for nine months German bombers raided Britain’s major cities. But the 7 September attack also came at the height of the Battle of Britain, the defence by RAF Fighter Command against the efforts of the German Air Force to win air superiority over southern England as a preparation for Operation Sea Lion, the German invasion of Britain. [...]"Read more

"American-born, British citizen by an ill-fated marriage, the modernist writer Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) was wary of nationalism, which she viewed as leading inevitably to either war or imperialism. Admittedly, she felt—as she wrote of one of her characters—“torn between anglo-philia and anglo-phobia,” and like all prominent modernists of her day, her views were probably not as enlightened as ours. But, except in times of war, she was decidedly unpatriotic and disdainful of provincialism, and her work on a 1930 avant-garde film, Borderline, decrying racial violence and prejudice in America is evidence of an unusual open-mindedness. [...]"Read more